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Falling knife

A price in fast, steep decline; buying one is the classic way to be early and wrong at the same time.

The image is exact: the knife lands before it is safe to pick up. Buying into a collapse means there is no structure to lean on, no obvious invalidation, and no way to tell the difference between a low and a pause.

What makes it attractive is that the price looks cheap relative to recent history, which is anchoring-bias in its purest form. The usual discipline is to wait for evidence of stabilisation - a base, a failed retest of the low, a reclaimed level - and accept a worse price in exchange for a definable risk. See dead-cat-bounce for what often gets mistaken for that evidence.

Related: dead-cat-bounce, anchoring-bias, capitulation, adding-to-losers

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